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The road to raiding

My guild alliance ran its first 25 man raid in Wrath last night. This is a milestone for any raid group, like when your startup gets its first real customer or your band gets its first gig and someone who isn’t actually a relative or partner turns up to see it (bonus points if you didn’t bribe them with free beer).

The reason it is such a big deal is that it’s a delicate process to get raids running in a new expansion. Players are deciding which raid group they want to associate with, and everything is up in the air until the point where you can strongarm or cajole enough people along and bosses start dying. I know a few people in our group had already been to pick up raids (ie. someone on one of the public channels asks for more random people to join them) or been triallists in other raid groups before deciding that they wanted to stick with us instead.

The startup is a pretty good comparison. Imagine that you are starting up a new business and it’s in an employees market so most of your potential staff have their choice of places to work. Even if people agree verbally to contracts with you, you’ve no guarantee they won’t suddenly change their mind when they get a better offer. Once you actually have real customers and can show your candidates some track record, your chances of attracting them are higher.

Of course raiding isn’t the same. You’re only paying people in terms of providing entertainment (that’s what running raids is about really), although there are social benefits too. But when people commit to a raid schedule, they want to know that they will be getting something worthwhile in return — to whit, a working and viable raid to be part of.

So the first successful raid is like a callout to all the guys who hung in there even before the raid had proven itself. It shows they made a good call. This is also why it’s great that the initial Wrath raids are fairly easy; if you can get 25 people together you WILL be able to go kill something.

Anyway, my guild alliance is a fairly casual setup. They’re being a bit more organised in Wrath than they had been in the last expansion and trying to keep a quota on class/roles so that we don’t end up with a gazillion tanks (again). This is a bit of a culture shock but going reasonably well so far, mostly because people from the old raid got grandfathered in and they only recruited for roles they were lacking.

The raid yesterday was notable for some other reasons:

I was main tank (my main is a protection warrior). I spent a lot of the afternoon chewing my nails nervously and reading raiding websites; it helps that a) I was at home with a cold and b) I don’t work wednesdays anyway. Oh, I was nervous alright. 24 other people relying on me to not mess up their evening. In practice, it’s nowhere near that bad. If one tank dies, someone else can often pick up. But you do feel a sense of responsibility. I also feel lucky to have the chance to raid as a protection warrior because it’s traditionally been an oversubscribed role.

We were late starting raiding. Although other raid groups have cleared all the content, and actually quite a few of the people there had seen much of it in pick up groups, we knew that as a more casual group we wanted to wait until January when more people would be ready. One of the odd side effects of that is that some of the guys we recruited were knocked back from more hardcore groups due to lack of room — so we were not their first choice but they wanted to play in 25 man raids and … well, there you have it. But it’s nice for everyone involved to see that even if you start late, you can still get things rolling.

We did clear a couple of wings in Naxxramas for anyone who wants the gory details, and we were happy with that for our first 3-hour 25 man raid.